Mt 11, 25-30
“I give you thanks, Father, because you have hidden these things…“
Those who felt the need for Jesus followed him… and only they understood the good News. Those who felt rejected by respectable people and rejected by a God who sent them calamities for their sins followed him. Public sinners, the poor, the sick and disabled, the humble and simple followed him; those who did not possess treasures on earth and could not feel attached to them.
Those who did not feel that need rejected him… and missed the good News. The doctors and the learned rejected him, whose intellectual pride prevented them from admitting anything that carpenter said or did. The priests and the powerful rejected him, who could not allow anyone to put their power at risk; the holy who dedicated their lives to the fulfillment of the Law and considered him an impostor from the beginning; the affluent who felt satisfied as they were…
Do we reject him too?, that is, does our enlightened spirit lead us to give more credit to the dictates of our mind than to his words? To what extent are his criteria still valid for us?… Probably these questions make no sense if we ask them of ordinary people, but they take on full meaning for us, the wise and learned, who have chosen a selective faith; shaped to our idiosyncrasy and subordinated to our reason.
This enlightened attitude puts us at risk of not starting from the gospel to seek truth, but from a truth that our mind has previously elaborated and from which we interpret the gospel. We run the risk of ending up questioning his conception of God and of the human being because it does not fit the metaphysics that is in vogue today. We run the risk of questioning his criteria for life, because our main concern —and we manifest it— is to advance in the criteria of the world at the pace the world advances.
We run the risk of putting Jesus in quarantine and striving to seek new wisdoms different from his; of approaching the gospel, not as someone who feels the need for it, but from that self-sufficiency so characteristic of our time and those of us who consider ourselves learned, which condemns us to not understanding almost anything. We run the risk of disqualifying the faith of simple people capable of believing in Jesus without our array of caveats, even though they bear much better fruits than we do.
The world tells us that we are the “wise and learned“ who best know “the truth“… but we read today’s text, and we see Jesus give thanks to the Father for having revealed “these things” to the simple and hidden them from the wise… And faced with this we only have two options; to ignore his words, or to reconsider the way we approach the gospel, because it is very likely that we are missing the good News.
As the doctors of Israel missed it.
Miguel Ángel Munárriz Casajús
To read an article by José E. Galarreta on a similar topic, click here